Cary Fukunaga to adapt Stephen King’s ‘It’

Warner Bros. splitting horror novel into two pics

Warner Bros. is planning to split “It” into two films and has tapped Cary Fukunaga to direct its adaptation of Stephen King’s horror thriller with Fukunaga co-writing the script with Chase Palmer.

A quarter of Warner-based producers — Roy Lee, Dan Lin and the team of Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg via their Katz-Smith banner — are producing the long-in-development project.

Warner Bros. tapped Dave Kajganich to adapt the novel in 2009 and had planned for a single movie at that point. “It” centers on seven children in a small Maine town who confront the source of a series of murders in 1958 and again in 1985, when the cycle begins again.

The novel was previously adapted into a 1990 ABC miniseries.

Jon Silk is co-producing.

Fukunaga directed “Jane Eyre” for Focus, which signed him last year to direct Civil War heist pic “No Blood, No Guts, No Glory.” Fukunaga is writing the screenplay with Palmer (who also penned “Dune”), whose original script appeared on the 2009 Black List.

Fukunaga and Palmer are both repped by WME. Fukunaga is also repped by Anonymous Content and Lichter Grossman; Palmer is also repped by The Gotham Group and Weissman Wolff.